is anyone surprised by this? did anyone, from the beginning, expect anything other than mugabe using the military (see the guardian article from earlier in the week about "vote mugabe or die") to hold on to power? does anyone realistically think there is any way whatsoever that Tsvangairai (sp?) is going to be allowed any power whatsoever? does anyone really think other african leaders are going to do anything to a leader who's still seen regionally as a liberator because of how he came to power in the 80s?

First of all, I don't care about Zimbabwe one bit. Second of all, I'm sick to death of being reminded that 'the BBC is banned from reporting in Zimbabwe'. It might be silly to ban them, but what's even sillier is the fact they have loads of journalists in South Africa reporting on it.

It is important news; the outcome will determine the future of a country. Not that it would be massively different; I think they'll still have problems, et cetera, that's not what I'm on about. But it's important, and I know you think it's not important to you, but the truth is that we're all interconnected, especially in this day and age, and so it will have an effect on the rest of the world, however subtle.

it's a major world event, you might not care about it but it's important. i think if more people had knowledge of WORLD events maybe they'd be a bit more measured and less knee-jerk to pissy little news stories cooked up by needle-dick Daily Mail jerks with nothing better to do but to try and stir up hatred in an otherwise peaceful society

this is one of the most important stories/events in the world. if you don't like it, piss off yourself

Sadly I suspect one of the by-products of the mess caused by the war in Iraq, and the general dissatisfaction and anger the invasion caused, is that Britain, the US and the UN as a whole will be reluctant to intervene in other nations unless really forced to due to fears of the backlash it'll cause.

Plus the "US only invade when there's oil" argument is perhaps disproved (or at least discredited) by their refusal to intervene in Sudan.

because China already has such a vested interest - they fund the government and supply arms to the gov't militias (allegedly), and intervening in that instance might turn into one of those Cold War by proxy type conflicts where it'd just be US vs China played out using players in another country as pawns.

I mean there's several reasons why they aren't intervening in Sudan. It just made me laugh when George Bush announced the US wasn't gonna act and loads of people with knowing smirks said "ah, he's only refusing to intervene 'cos there's no oil there..."

I mean obviously any country's foreign polciy is going to weigh up self-interest in the equation as much as (or in many cases far more than) philanthropic and altruistic motives. It just frustrates me a little when people simplify complex international diplomatic decisions to being purely about oil etc.

I mean the point is that oil may have been a factor in US involvement in Iraq but it was only a factor. And I'm absolutely certain there were several others factors that led the US government to choose to intervene, including many of those they expressed i.e. concern about perceived threat to US interests and certainly there's documented evidence that some of the US administration (Paul Wolfowitz for example) were in favour of intervention in Iraq on philanthropic grounds as early as the mid-90s.

I mean I was against the Iraq invasion and thought in particular it was handled appallingly badly but nonetheless when people claim that oil was the primary factor in the Iraq war, rather than just one of many factors, they tend to make a lot of assumptions based on sketchy evidence and subcribe to a rather cartoonish view of world politics that tries to find obvious good guys and bad guys from a very morally ambiguous and complex situation.

If it's self-interest that motivated the US invasion, oil is but a part of that. A much larger attraction for the US is to have an ally in the Middle East who isn't Israel, and who can act as a potential base of operations against Iran if need be. A stable, democratic Iraq (with the dozen or so permanent US military bases which will remain there regardless of the other troops heading home) will allow the US to get a firmer grip upon potential threats to NATO from the area.

But I do feel that the Iraq war was motivated entirely by self-interest. Philanthropy only came into it once the WMDs were shown to be a fabrication. Before the 20th Century it was entirely commonplace, and indeed the norm, for countries to instigate wars to capture economic resources - that was the basis of Empire, after all. The First World War created such a distaste for wars in the powerful countries of the world that the idea that peoples' lives could be ended over something as petty as cotton or coal just wouldn't wash any more - yet that's the reason those nations were as powerful as they were. It's not unreasonable to think that there wasn't the massive shift in motives for conflict in the minds of the governments of the West, I think, and most conflicts of the past century have still been at least partly, if not totally, motivated by preserving the geopolitical status quo.

And I certainly don't think any countries ever invaded one without it being in their interests to do so (hence why there's so many dictators in the world that neither the US nor anyone else makes any efforts to remove, hence why China & Russia opposed the Kosovo war and why China's got no interest whatsoever in helping the people of Burma.)

But nonetheless there is fairly good evidence to suggest that some members of the US and British administration did also believe in the moral value of intervening in Iraq and that did influence their decision-making process.

That's not to say that I believe the war could have happened if it had gone against US interests for the war to happen but nor do I believe it could have happened unless there were people who believed they were doing something morally 'good' (or at least not moraly harmful) for the people of Iraq.

All the points you've made undoubtedly stand as correct but nonetheless I get the impression reading some people's arguments agains the US government that they beleive they're these cartoon supervillains who sit in underground layers and hatch plans and conspiracies to be as evil as possible and that's just now how people function in reality.

Almost everyone likes to believe they're essentially 'good' people and that their actions are justifiable and have widely good consequences. Even if US interests was the original motivator for the Iraq War it nonethless needed people to be able to convince themselves that it was a morally good decision. And I'm sure most of the US and UK governments who argued for it did genuinely believe moral 'right' was on their side.

And whilst I agree there were certainly elements of the adminstrations that were motivated by the moral quandries, I still think they were outnumbered by the pragmatists, seeing an economic and military necessity in Iraq.

I'm very, very left wing (an anarchist, in fact), but I find left-wing movements so frustrating in their black-and-white views of so many issues. The US in particular gets so much hate and bile towards me I almost get offended, having been born there (and genuinely loving the place, if not patriotically); and the US government tends to be blamed for many of the world's ills when it's only ever partly to blame, or even partly intended to do the things it's blamed for.

It's like the Loose Change documentary and the other 9/11 conspirators. The Bush administration has shown itself, time and time again, to be spectacularly inept at managing to follow through on even the most basic pieces of policy. Yet the complexity of the 9/11 plots is apparently realistic. Madness.

I remember the protests and campaigns about the intervention of Kosovo in the late 90s (which was basically on these precise grounds of Milosevic not being a nice person) and that was long before Iraq and the War on Terror.

Admittedly they were much smaller protests than the Iraq War ones and it didn't get widespread public support but there was nonetheless a sizable left-wing protest about it.

I suspect 10 years later and with the potential to draw comparisons to Iraq, and with concenrs about US Imperialism being much higher and much more in the public domain, there would be a bigger protest than to the Kosovo War (thogh smaller than Iraq).

And, aside from humanitarian grounds, many people (especially in the US) would oppose the war due to concerns about both spreading troops too thinly and endangering soldiers' lives in yet another war that doesn't directly benefit the US or UK by its being fought.

but i was talking to a guy from there the other night and it sounded pretty shit from what i heard. Id consider myself left wing, but i think in the case of this i think its by far the lesser of two evils, and the humanitarian aspect of not letting this continue is sizeable.

only really applies militarily. It stems from our colonial history, and the danger that even if we went in and liberated people under dictatorships, we'd just set up a replacement that was either another dictator in our favour (as was a favourite tactic of the US), or the government that replaced it would be limited by a constitution which was engineered to be advantageous to the West.

I'm all in favour of intervention through economic blockades and diplomatic means. But I haven't made my mind up about military intervention. In some ways I think a more effective, and fairer way, would be to funnel funds to resistance groups and engineer protest movements that could bring down the government - although, our history of doing this tends to end in a lot of bloodshed and no results. It's a quandry.

And the country needed to be rebuilt, there were huge numbers of international corporations who were waiting for the opportunity. The US, now in control of the country, decided that only companies from the victorious coalition (which meant mainly American with a few British, Japanese, Korean, Australian etc firms) would be allowed to take on building contracts. Part of this is that the US also had the ability to control the oil supplies of Iraq. OPEC, the cartel that controls the world price of oil, has long been considered dangerous to US administrations - being made of mainly Islamic states hostile to the West, not only does it have the potential to destroy the economy of the West if it wanted, it also regularly limits production below what is possible, forcing up prices and damaging the US economy anyway. Iraq has the 4th largest oil fields in the world, and if it was outside of OPEC and in the control of the US it would be able to break the cartel and force a price war, which in turn would result in a massive drop in the price of oil and secured energy supplies for the US.

Perhaps not as primary an objective for the US invasion (I still think it's more of a public mugging to show Iran and North Korea who's the boss), but it would be absurd to think it was irrelevant. The Bush administration has been obsessed with Saddam Hussein even before 9/11 (within minutes of the towers coming down Rumsfeld was telling people to "find a way to pin this on Saddam") for various reasons, oil being one of the main ones - many of Bush Snr's government were angry at him not following the Iraqis all the way out of Kuwait and flushing Saddam out, because it would help the floundering US economy to have some cheap oil.

the first thing they need to do is string up their incompetent, childish and utterly corrupt leaders from lamp posts.

No more liberal heart wringing, no more post-imperial guilt. Direct aid to those who really need it by all means, food and medical aid, for sure. But, no more debt cancellation for governments who see fit to spend their money on fleets of S Class Mercedes and weapons systems.

the problem is that in places where there's little hope, little optimism, people tend to turn to unsuitable, extreme candidates. and somewhere like africa, there's not exactly the hope of prosperity ever, is there?

as a result, yes, leaders who can sample the western, richer, affluent lifestyle are likely to become corrupted and to crave it at all costs, and go to great lengths to sustain it.

the problem is, you'll find a fuck of a lot of african countries will not allow food and medical aid into their countries if the west's not offering debt cancellation or something equivalent. result, the people are even worse off (but hey! we've got the moral high ground if we follow your argument, so that's okay!)

i don't think you can blame africans - or at least you shouldn't. the problem with your argument is that you're assigning the knowledge, the wisdom, thr rights etc that we have in the west to african people. african people want different things, they have different customs and traditionals, and ways of doing things. to chastise them for being different is more the simplistic reader-pandering of the right-wing press than anything else.

of course, i don't have a fucking clue how to sort africa out. i don't think anyone does, that's why so much of it is a mess (not all of it is, mind you. it's a very stupid assumption to say "africa is fucked" like it's one entity or something). but simplistic statements like the one you've said above don't help anyone, aside from giving you a means to vent your misplaced rage

British troops make up a large part of international troop forces, for NATO and the UN. And not every troop is going to be mobilised at once, you have to rotate the troops otherwise you get drops in morale. Leave is already being shortened, and soldiers in the TA (who aren't even meant to be on the frontline) are being sent out to Afghanistan and Iraq. We're really stretched out.

For every unit that is in Iraq/Afghanistan you have a unit that has just returned and cannot be redeployed (or else the entire army would be on operations constantly and everybody would leave) and another unit that is in pre-deployment training to take over from a unit that is there at the moment.

He was the president who was going to return Zimbabwe's land to the majority black population from the minority white farmers. If we intervened there's a good chance we'd fuck up the post-invasion planning (we have a track record of that, after all), and if we're not careful any short-term good will could be replaced by yet more anti-West, anti-colonial feeling which would result in yet another extremist dictator being elected.

that the opposition increasingly pushes the same neo-liberal agenda as Zanu PF offering nothing for the workers of the country while the bourgeois continue to benefit. I think the article _vikram posted raises important questions, although it fails to offer any kind of answers to them. How is it that political elite (in Zimbabwe) are so out of touch with reality that they fail to ever see the need for grassrooots activism and protest to challenge the way the current administration runs roughshod over the (admittedly limited) idea of democracy. In short it's time for a real opposition who represent the poor, ordinary workers of the country and offer an alternative to the madness of the market economy.